Saturday, 23 January 2016

This article is reprinted with permission, from his blog Ecospirit 16 Jan 2016.

After years of fraught negotiations, we have a climate accord. Just getting 195 countries with different, often conflicting, interests to agree was a miracle of sorts. The document breaks new ground by aiming to hold the average temperature rise below 2C, to 1.5C, and reaching carbon neutrality by the “second half of the century.” The road map for how to get there is less clear. The INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions – whew!) are not binding, relying upon peer pressure at periodic reviews to curtail carbon emissions even further than current pledges, which would take us down to 3.5C, still well beyond the threshold of climate catastrophe. The current pledges do not go into effect until 2020, though there will be an opportunity for revising upward with a review process every five years. This is not tough enough, fast enough.

In a post this week at Common Dreams, Jeremy Brecher, a labor historian, notes that the governments of the world accepted no accountability in Paris, only going on record with a stronger common goal. Since they, and to some degree the U.N. as well, are accountable to the vested interests which put them in power, it is up to the people to stand up and force them to be “accountable to the world's real owners,” the people. In a more detailed piece, “A Non-Violent Insurgency for Climate Protection,” Brecher argues that there is legal ground for the people to rise up in multiple acts of civil disobedience to force governments, who are trustees guarding the air, oceans and forests, to abide by the laws that safeguard these critically endangered commons in a “global law-enforcing climate insurgency.” The foundation for this is called in the US thepublic trust doctrine, which is based upon the Justinian code of 535 A.D., naming certain areas asres communes, “common things” that are not held by the state. Hence the beleaguered notion of the commons. As Brecher puts it eloquently, “The governments of the world may rule the world, but they don't run the world – that is the common property of humanity.”

Fortunately, to defend that common property, an independent climate protection movement has emerged, which Brecher dates to the mass International Day of Climate Action in 2009, the most widespread political action day in planetary history. This has grown in recent years into the Blockadia movement, expertly documented by Naomi Klein. Increasingly, these actions are designed as civil disobedience aimed at enforcing fundamental legal and constitutional principles that are being flouted by the authorities they are disobeying. By calling these abuses into question, they are performing their legal duty, planetary citizens mounting what legal scholar James Gray Pope calls a “constitutional insurgency.” This insurgency aims to transform the world order, which Brecher argues is more attainable than challenging individual nation-states, and has in fact happened more than once in our lifetimes. Crucially, Brecher notes that the current world order, which protects the global corporations, especially Big Fossils, is “illegitimate but mutable.”

As law-enforcing or constitutional insurgents, activists are now invoking the necessity defence, which was unexpectedly successful in the case of Friend Jay O'Hara, when he and Ken Ward blocked a coal vessel at Brayton Point, Mass with his lobster boat (photo above). Defendants who blocked an oil train in 2014 in Washington state are mounting the same defense. We shall see what the court's response is. Even if the courts don't accept their arguments, these actions can “redefine what climate action is all about.” If legal actions continue to fail, Brecher envisions civil society tribunals chaired by senior retired judges and other respected figures calling expert witnesses with publicly acknowledged credentials. It's all about civil society moving into the black hole of accountability which the current world order lacks. I am convinced that civil society, in carefully strategized actions, their trials managed by expert environmental lawyers, can affect the misguided but mutable world order.

Since governments serve as trustees of the commons, environmental lawyers are working to utilize trust law to enforce the people's rights to enjoying the benefits of these commons. It may seem far-fetched – one environmental lawyer calls these kinds of challenges “hail Mary passes” - but successful use of trust law could require fossil fuel companies to pay damages for the colossal waste committed against the public trust. Fair damages would pay most of what is required to transition to a zero-carbon economy, and build the global Green Fund to help poor nations adapt to climate change.

Governments of the world need to be made accountable to the world's real owners. Yes, Jeremy Brecher, according to the Justinian code. But nobody owns the world, as the indigenous peoples will tell us. Ultimately, the world is God's, and the building climate insurgency is about the people rising up to return the Commons to Her. Or if you prefer, to Gaia, the evolutionary miracle which brought this perfectly-placed third rock to superabundant life. Earth stewardship in these critical times means joining the insurgency to defend Gaia, with whatever gifts we have.

Thursday, 8 October 2015

The cash-strapped UN World Food Programme has just dropped one-third of Syrian refugees from its food voucher program. In Sep 2015 over 360,000 Syrian refugees in countries neighbouring on Syria stopped receiving food. Earlier in 2015 the WFP had already cut recipients from 2.1 million to around 1.4 million, as well as the value of the vouchers.

The WFP crisis is a direct result of deliberate underfunding by rich countries. The agency needed $236m to keep even the reduced program funded through November 2015. Only a few donors (Saudi and Qatar) have come forward, though the US just earmarked $85m for similar starvation crises in South Sudan.

Donors' squabbling has deadlocked food aid for 25 years. The rich countries have steadily cut money donations: total international agricultural aid fell from $1.9 billion in 1981 to less than $1 billion by 2001. The rich want to use “in kind” aka “tied aid” so they can dump their agricultural surpluses, which destroy the livelihood of local farmers. By 2008 there were only a few weeks' supply on hand.

The worldwide food crisis of 2008 plunged 100 million into extreme poverty. In Haiti and elsewhere the starving ate mud. "There has been a very deep institutional failure over how we deal with food problems," said C. Peter Timmer, a Harvard emeritus professor who studies food security. "Everybody understands that 80 percent of the world's poor are in rural areas. But the World Bank for 30 years has basically said market signals don't support agriculture, so we can't support agriculture."

Meanwhile, backed by USAID and AGRA, giant corporations push “climate smart agriculture” and a second “green revolution”: with GMOs, chemical fertilizers, fossil-fueled machinery, and marketing systems. This will deepen the climate crisis, the poverty of small farmers and hungry, vulnerable populations.

The NGO food justice movement (led by Via Campesina, IATP and Food First, etc.) urge food sovereignty, sustainable agroecology, and supporting women in agriculture. QUNO calls for UN recognition of the right to food and protection of genetic resources. In the US itself, the plight of black farmers and imported contract labor is ignored. None of these goals are recognized by the WFP and its funders.

PS: Michael Ignatieff in NYRB 18 Nov 2015puts this in geopolitical perspective, urging a new and better version ofR2P. Basically he argues that the USA should accept half of the Syrian refugees (65,000 as UNHCR requests -- it would take 250,000 for the US to be as generous as Canada), and pressure other powers to feed the starving in the camps. These policies are morally and politically essential to support US allies, defeat ISIS propaganda, and rescue a Middle East generation from despair that will certainly create more jihadis. The stateless "will never forget" if they are turned away and starved. He urges creation of a new Nansen passport with biometric ID for all migrants. And he states correctly that the world refugee/migrant flow guided by iphones and Facebook is unstoppable by conventional "border security". If the US and European racist right wins by forcing this false solution, they (and we all) will lose. Sadly, this would be to repeat US history. Remember theSt Louis.

Sunday, 12 April 2015

The author is a founder of the RainforestAction Network and consultant at the World Future Council founded by Jacob von Uexküll:50 eminent global change-makers from governments, parliaments, civil society, academia, the arts and business. This position paper is re-posted with the author's permission from Foundation Earth, his new "ecological economy" thinktank.

.

Over the next century communities worldwide will experience an
unprecedented shift of weather instability. Extreme weather events
are ecological spasms often driving economic spasms and regional
collapses. Concerned citizens and opinion leaders need to prepare
before these eco-spasms proliferate. Far from being prepared, most
leaders and power brokers are not mindful of the rethinking that
is required. This working paper and appendix offers a brief
economic vision, a set of economic principles, and list of
problematic trends to help respond to the challenges as we work
for a better day. –Randy Hayes

If
I had a lot of money, I couldn’t afford to live as well as I
do. – Mike
Roselle, grassroots organizer and a founder of Earth First

A True-Cost Economy serves
society and respects the environment

Foundation Earth’s Strategic Response

It would be foolhardy to think that restructuring the global economy for long-term deep sustainability is an easy task, but we aren’t the type of people to give up. We will make this meaningful shift or we will go down fighting. Foundation Earth will put forth its solutions as thoughtfully and powerfully as we can, given our humble resources. Together we can help ensure that nature’s life support systems are healthy and that biological diverse systems, particularly large wild areas, are protected. Such systems are key to humanity’s wellbeing and the entire web of life.

Cheater Economics

There is indeed an “invisible hand”
which left to its own devises promotes general good. That hand turns
out to be nature’s ways – nourishing all things. The industrial
economic invisible hand could best be called “Cheater Economics”
(externalizing pollution costs). We call for a “True Cost Economy”
based on nature’s ways.

This campaign can be thought of a
twenty-five year process to help foster such a shift... the known
unknowns and the unknown unknowns present sizable difficulties.
Nature has a non-linear way of being. Will the soft landing of a
semi-elegant twenty-five year economic transition be possible?
Certainly not if we are headed to a four degree world. It will more
likely be mini-collapses and rebuilding. We will prepare for both
scenarios as best we can.

Nature’s “invisible hand” left to
its own devices may indeed promote general good, but our collective
campaign for a better world will need an active and visible hand.
Please let us know what else you think we should be looking at and
how you might help to enact this vision. Additional information on
the model and the context of this work is in Appendix I.

The Vision Starts with an Integrated
Set of Goals

In this “age of plenty” vast
numbers experience a deep spiritual hunger. Our current global
economic system is achieving insufficiently and desperately needs to
be changed. The goals of a better society aren’t so hard to
imagine. In a simple straightforward sense we want highly
educated/ecologically astute people, high levels of political and
spiritual freedom, low infant mortality, low impact/low throughput
lifestyles, clean environment with wild beautiful natural places, and
a small gap between the greater and least financially well off
people. We want to live in a close and proper relationship to nature,
our communities, and the institutions we create. Arguably this would
mean a rapid transition to a smaller primarily regional economy with
less production and consumption, while improving likelihood of
dignified and happier lives. It starts with selecting where you want
to grow (wisdom, art, culture…) and where you want to degrow
(pollution, industrial workaholic lives, intolerance…).

Picturing the New Era

A smaller economy tingles with vitality
while producing and consuming less. Businesses respect the laws of
nature and integrate principles of ecology. Systems function well
within the carrying capacity of regional and global ecosystems.
People value the fundamental cycles of life, understanding that
nature supports all life, now and in the future. No one exports
problems to other societies or to future generations. Everyone faces
the reality of a true cost economy and benefits from it. If anyone
pollutes, they pay the true cost of the hazards and damages.
Conserving stuff, along with the inclination to consume less,
lightens the true cost. In the new era, everyone appreciates that
natural resources cannot be owned. They cannot be exploited – not
for very long. There are no “corporate socialists in free market
clothing” receiving subsidies. Market capital gravitates to
sustainable solutions.

Yes, all this boils down to economic
details. We exercise financial discipline. We balance budgets. We
maintain financial reserves. We leverage debt with caution. We
interact with other economies as partners – actually, as family
members. There are still markets, mostly local, and we still seek to
profit, but we internalize ecological and social costs through a
truly transparent balance sheet of assets and liabilities. Yes, we
seek increased prosperity, but we don’t attach this sense of
wellbeing to the growth of stuff. We tie our sense of wellbeing to
infinite possibilities in a finite physical world.

Central to the new era we will see that
exploding populations will have stabilized and in fact declined
dramatically. Via our numbers and by our commitment to future
generations, natural systems rejuvenate beneath our reduced
footprint. Food and agricultural systems will be much more focused on
bioregional economies. Picture continental networks of more
self-reliant local economies. Most of what is traded at the global
level is art, culture, and ideas.

Effective governing requires informed
people and a commitment to a set of just and wise principles. That is
not where we are starting from yet we must shoulder our
responsibility to work for the continuance of all life. Some believe
that an economic paradigm shift from unaccountable exploitation is
not only necessary, but unavoidable. What set of principles might
this be built from? Here is a starting point that needs your help to
improve.

A societal recognition that nature
nourishes all things is a higher value then human self-interest. The
economic rules reward solving problems together over personal
aggrandizement. Any market system is subservient to nature’s laws.
Cooperation not competition is the social doctrine and basis for the
new economic order. Industrial advance crushing nature’s ways for
the sake of capital is a thing of the past.

2. Responsibility

Each generation leaves less and less of
an ecological footprint, despite the population size, consumption
rates, or technology choices. Every human has the duty to protect
diversity within the whole. Nature has an inalienable right to exist,
flourish, and evolve. Hard work to personally get ahead would still
have a place in the system, but beyond sustainable consumption
levels, family education, and retirement security most of any
economic proceeds would need to support broader values.

3. Carrying
Capacity

(sometimes called Planetary
Boundaries): Free markets are not free from ecological limits. The
economy and society must work to keep population, rates of
consumption, and technologies in synch with (below) global,
continental, and bioregional carrying capacity limits. The carrying
capacity of a biological region needs to rule its human economy.
Institutions of educational research and public governance need to be
set up to better understand, and communicate appropriate operating
spaces.

4. True Cost

When pollution externalities are
internalized into the price you pay for goods and services, the
“ecologically cleanest is the cheapest”. Wind and solar would be
cheaper than dirty coal. Organic tomatoes or cotton would be cheaper
than toxic tomatoes or cotton. When that is achieved we have more of
a “True Cost Economy” and a more level business “playing”
field. In a True Cost Economy the search for a bargain works for us
instead against us. Dumping pollution into the river or sky is a form
of “Cheater Economics” and has to stop. The True Cost Principle
is analogous to the Polluter Pays Principle or the Internalization by
Design approach. While everyone likes a bargain, it needs to be an
honest bargain.

5. Non-commodification
of Nature

Non-renewable resources (soil, water,
land, primary forests etc.) aren’t to be treated as a commodity. Of
the three basic categories of economic relationship include
ownership, stewardship, and partnership the third one is to be
emphasized in the general economy. Stewardship still implies some
patriarchy (ex: I will steward you…), while partnership shows a
more authentic reciprocity.

6. Precautionary
Technology

When the consequences are possibly
cataclysmic (such as cancer death) employ a “when in doubt play it
safe” approach. This is what a mother does when raising her child
and what we should do regarding the planet we live upon. The “burden
of proof” lies with the initiator. Problem shifting is
unacceptable. There are times when policies and laws should buffer
nature from the market. This should especially be employed with all
new technologies (see quote at end of this section). Envision the
precautionary principle as a major part of technology policy.

7. Compassionate
Local Self-Reliance

Employing the “Small is Beautiful”
approach. Community-based, local production for local markets;
trading within and among communities; new-style bartering without the
traditional growth concept inherent to today’s money; and trading
values for values, satisfying real needs, while helping others,
rather than inventing new ones will be the approach of this economy.
Maximize local, regional, and continental self-reliance, while
actively helping other adjacent regions or elsewhere on the planet
maximize their self-reliance (foreign aid policy). This is the care
economy not the personal profit economy. Adhere to the subsidiarity approach,
while valuing place & community.

Subsidiarity is an organizing approach or principle that
matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least
centralized competent authority.

8. Prosperity for
All

The economic system is set up to help
all (now and the future) earn and enjoy financial and food security,
success, or good fortune. Greedy individual advance at the expense of
others would not be tolerated.

9. Ecological
Literacy

Wild nature, operating according to its
own laws, is our principal teacher. Nature’s laws are immutable and
a higher order then human laws. Members of public governance are
responsible to understand the principles of biosphere ecology and to
help all constituents to understand nature’s ways such that all can
support the whole. There is no economic development or social justice
on a dead planet.

10. Public
Governance

Employing ecological literacy with
other humanistic values, society must debate the legitimate functions
of public governance and then fund it to fulfill those functions in a
thoroughly competent manner. This includes deciding the level of the
social safety net. Government regulation is not the enemy.
Appropriate government regulation is key to protect the whole for
this and future generations of the entire web of life. As E.F.
Schumacher clarified, a sensible political economy fits nature and
human nature.

11. Zero Waste

The economy needs to essentially be a
zero waste, closed loop, sustainable production and consumption
system. This is especially true for non-renewable resources.

12. Self-Correcting
Feedback

Every living system must have accurate
feedback to self-correct. Note the distorting effects of many current
measures of progress and welfare such as the Dow Jones Index or GDP.
Accurate and holistic measures need to be employed such that people
see what they need in a timely manner (i.e. some items weekly,
monthly, quarterly, annually, by decade, by century, etc.) to make
mid-course corrections. The new parameters will measure levels of
public health and education, standards of nutrition, housing, gender
equality, use of renewable resources, use of non-renewable resources,
the degree of local self-reliance, and the success a closed-loop,
zero-waste sustainable production and consumption system. There will
be indicators of preventative health, ecological restoration,
society’s capacity to resolve conflicts, and more.

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated
harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis
for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new
and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that
it previously produced. – Jared Diamond

Problematic Trends

As we ponder an economic transition,
what trends should we be cognizant of?

- The Age of Irresponsibility: the last
sixty years of the industrial revolution (late 1700s to now)
...fostered a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms
along with adding billions of people. This has shredded much of the
planet’s web of life and weakened our life support systems.

- There is strong evidence that the
IPCC, with its thousand scientists, significantly underestimated
the speed and momentum of greenhouse gas-driven ocean heating and
biospheric stresses. We are faced with the need to make rapid and
dramatic changes in the way we do nearly everything.

- It may be necessary to reduce GHGsby
80% by 2020(8 years from 2012) to stay below 2 degree centigrade
average temperature rise even though a two-degree rise is risky to
life, as we have known it. Solutions commensurate with the scale
and timing of the biospheric problems are not in popular dialog.

- A
sense of what to do in the short, medium, and long-term isn’t
broadly understood. Structural solutions leading to a new
economic model won’t likely be popularized in time to lead to any
semi-soft landing.

- The earth’s capacity to support
lifewill decrease. Extreme weather events will increase. The
biosphere will spasm. Declining natural systems re linked to greater
social inequity.

- The Living
Planet Index reports that 1/3 of the natural world has been
obliterated. The rate of destruction is increasing in most sectors.
Our home planet is fast becoming uninhabitable.

Industrial agriculture is degrading or
destroying the soil of one third of all land. Resource abuse
of those life support systems may be a bigger problem than climate
change.

- Floods and droughts from
extreme weather events will disrupt food production such that the
planetary population in 2100 could be less than at the beginning of
the century.

- Disease will be more prevalent
when antibiotics quit working.

- Eighty percent of the people in
industrialized countries currently live in big cities. By 2050 the
80% megalopolis will beworldwide. There are about a ¼
million more people a day to feed and a ~¼ billion women who want to
plan their families, but lack access to such planning services.

- The current economic problem was not
brought on by Wall Street financial excesses, though there were many.
Nor is it because of the commitment to growth, though that
exacerbates problems. At its core the crisis is brought on by an
ongoing lack of understanding and respect of the ecological
principles that effectively are the operating system for the
planet.

- Most elected officials and key
agencies are subservient to big business; hence we don’t have
“public governance”. For instance, US Treasury Dept. is too
much of an arm of Wall Street. A few decades of incremental efforts
to fix problems have little to show for the effort.

- Virtually all social change
movementsin the US are not involved in electingwiser, committed
people. [Exceptions in environmental movement, at the national level,
include Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and Defenders of
Wildlife.]

- Americans, left largely uneducated
about ecological/economic realities and unorganized, are
relatively helpless and will do little but watch the decline until
that changes.

- Regarding the current global economic
malaise, a return to... a flourishing economy with strong growth is
not at all a likely option. One may see slow growth for a while with
high unemployment, but it cannot get back (at least not for long) to
“business as usual”

Author's note: Additional information on the
model and the context of this work is included in Appendix I.

Saturday, 21 March 2015

Nature Climate Change reported two years ago that krill were in danger from CO2 ocean acidification. The entire ecosystem could collapse within 200 years, says biologist Dr So Kawaguchi. It is already under stress from climate change: temperature rise, productivity change and ice melt. Another NCC article reported the dangers to other species. Vast areas of the ocean will become uninhabitable for reproduction of the krill, a keystone species on which whales, seals, penguins and seabirds depend. The British Antarctic Survey points to an 80% decline of krill since the 1970s, possibly due to loss of food: algae under shrinking sea ice.

Meanwhile another threat has emerged: industrial overfishing. Huge factory ships suck up tons of krill to turn them into "organic" fertilizer, omega-3 pills and fishmeal for farmed fish. In effect, corporations are becoming the primary predator. Krill still constitute the largest biomass on the planet, outweighing the human population. In 2013, Sea Shepherd reported ships from Norway (shown), China, Korea, and Poland. Ironically, some receive Marine Stewardship Council "sustainability" certification -- which leads to questions whether big conservation NGOs like WWFare greenwashing.Following the fishmeal trail raises more questions: is this yet another case of factory farming, dangerous to ecosystems as well as human health? Sea Shepherd states: Fish farming has many well-documented problems: pollution of the fish farm locations, spreading of diseases and parasites to wild populations, higher contaminant levels than wild-caught fish... predators, like seals and sea lions [are] killed for being attracted to the fish farms and especially the wastefulness of catching fish (and in this case Krill), to feed other fish, to feed people...and dog food. Will there come a time when our pets consume more Krill than the world’s whales, like our factory farmed animals consume more fish than the world’s sharks?Industrial competition for protein "is becoming more and more acute," Denzil Miller of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources told the New York Times. Though scientific estimates of the actual stock are still guesswork, NYT predicted the krill-killing industry, with new pumping and evaporator technology, could "jump from just more than 100,000 tons to several million tons" a year. Another fisheries collapse is in the making.Further readingEncyclopedia of Earth, the "Antarctica Large Marine System" (2012).SOS Antarctic Krill, list of recent scientific studies.Someofus.org: "Vacuuming the Antarctic for krill" (petition 2014).

Monday, 16 March 2015

A collapse of West Coast scallop hatcheries is reported inDesmogblog (20 June 2014, excerpt):

In 2013, 25 years of smooth sea scallop farming at Island Sea Scallops suddenly came to an end. Years of dealing with a 10 per cent mortality rate, suddenly hit 90 to 95 per cent,CEO Rob Saunders told DeSmog Canada from his office in Qualicum Beach, B.C.

Over 10 million scallops died from the 2010, 2011 and 2012 batches. It was an unprecedented die-off and Saunders attributes their deaths to an increasingly acidic ocean. Saunders’ tests reveal the pH balance of the water used in his nursery dropped from the average of 8.2 to 7.2.

Some uncertainty still remains as to the cause of the die-off, but scientists have shown the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing the acidity of the oceans and inhibiting “the development and survival of larval shellfish.”

“A lot of people criticize me, saying you can’t prove it and of course I can’t, but the correlation is pretty strong,” says Saunders.

Islands Scallops along with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans are undertaking a research project to determine the root cause of the massive scallop die off.

This year, Island Scallops introduced a new heartier species of scallop and quickened harvest rates, “because we don’t expect the animals to live for two years,” said Saunders. The pH level is up a bit to 7.6, but Saunders is still seeing a 40 to 50 per cent mortality rate.

“Am I feeling desperate – absolutely,” said Saunders “If you want to maintain a coastal industry, then we are going to need some help – we are going to need some help now, not two years from now.”